


the apparitions, they seem real

by hooksandheroics



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Bedsharing, F/M, First Kiss, Mourning, Someone Dies but not Permanently
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24165802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/pseuds/hooksandheroics
Summary: Jyn knew that there is never a certainty to lives lived in war.And yet, her mind whispers.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 14
Kudos: 28





	the apparitions, they seem real

**Author's Note:**

> warning: someone dies but not permanently
> 
> and hi, this has been swimming around in my brain for a while now and it HAS to be written because lately, i've been going back into the quicksand that is rebelcaptain. i hope you all enjoy, and let me know what you think after.

Jyn has prepared for this.

There is a kind of sense of security that comes with knowing that all around the base are people with the same instincts as her, that in the room adjacent to hers are a couple of Pathfinders on leave for a couple of days after back-to-back missions on some distant Mid-Rim planet. The room across the hall has four bunk beds and data crunchers on night shift. It’s empty and dark but there’s a kind of comfort there, too.

She’s in a room of her own or – well, she’s not on her own.

Has been _not alone_ for some time now, she’s got to remind herself frequently.

She _is_ by herself now in this lonely twin-sized bed. Has been by herself for two weeks, a day, and some hours since Cassian left for a solo mission. They didn’t fight about it or, well, tried not to. He’d left and the only thing he’d left her with was the shadow of the sensation when their foreheads touched.

He didn’t kiss her and she really, really wished he had. He _looked_ like he wanted to kiss her, and maybe that was a promise for when he came back – _I’m coming back to kiss you_. It could be that, or it could be that she’s been painting every little thing between them with pastel colors because she’s been alone for too long.

 _Not alone_ , she hears his voice in her head. Helped by the fact that he’s said this over and over again to her at different times, heavy with different meanings, every single one of them.

What she does long for now in this cold lonely bed is the one thing that they share that feels like it’s never going to break, whatever hell may happen between them. She wants to lie down and feel him at her back, not a shadow of a sensation, not imagination, but the real him and his arms around her. Never has she felt constricted in his embrace.

He asked, the first time. He said, “can I?” and trailed off as his thumb ran up and down the skin of her arm – and while that drove the air out of her lungs for three endless seconds, somehow, she wanted more.

She said _yes_ , and then sometime in the night, pulled him closer and burrowed into the crook of his neck.

Since then, she’s wanted more. It screams from her chest every time he laughs at her sarcasm in the dark, every single time she feels the hair at her nape move with a quiet chuckle, every time he so much as smiles against her skin at something amusing.

They talk in the nights like they have no responsibilities in the mornings. They tangle their legs together like they have nowhere else to go. They exchange stories like they weren’t still digging graves for the skeletons in their closets.

Some peace, she sighs, now that it’s missing in her life.

She tries to sleep, tries what Chirrut says helps. She breathes and holds and tries not to growl in frustration when her thoughts stray to the point on her forehead that he’s touched. It’s childish and pathetic to wait for a sensation to come back when their lives are shrouded with uncertainty (and then if she lets herself spiral down _that_ train of thought, she would just throw the blankets off and march down the hallway to a dimly lit training room to split her knuckles open with a couple of sparring dummies – so she doesn’t).

So when the door swooshes open, when she hears a soft sigh, the back of her neck prickles with goosebumps. He doesn’t open the lights because, and it could just be her that’s thinking of this, because one time, she stubbed her toe somewhere in this dark room and he said _a good spy doesn’t ever get their toes stubbed in the dark_ and has tried to prove it to her ever since.

Or it’s the blanket of peace that has suddenly floated and settled in the room.

It’s no longer just cold, it’s cold now with the promise of warmth and a story painted on her skin, careful not to touch but reckless enough to be felt even without sound.

Jyn has prepared for this.

And so when he settles at her back and wraps an arm around her, she finally lets out a long sigh into the dark.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he tells her, voice soft and rough and tired.

She shakes her head. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

He pulls her closer. “Were you waiting up?” _For me_ , he didn’t say, but it hangs in the air between their bodies.

“I seem to have been promised something,” she says, biting her lip. Did that sound too needy? Too dismissive? She runs her fingers along the length of his forearm absently, trying to find a way to disturb the silence with something else.

“Were you now?” he sounds breathless, too quiet. She can ask him why he’s whispering when there’s nobody else to hear them, but the silence and the night seem to demand low voices and lower inhibitions.

She lets that slow drag of warmth run under her skin and turns around to face him – not at all prepared for the pound of her heart at the realization that she’s _been missing_ him when he was gone. He seems to be going through the same thoughts, eyes bright and lips parted.

She could kiss him right now. She could kiss his beautiful lips right now.

“I don’t remember promising anything,” he says, and there’s a small quirk at the corner of his lips, something knowing and secretive behind that not-smile. She feels terror grip her heart for a moment when she realizes that he could _know_ , that he could be playing her.

 _Look at his eyes_.

His eyes are sincere. His eyes are longing and true, and while those could just be things that are thrown to the ground carelessly, Jyn treasures _truth_. There has been a scarcity of truth in her life and Cassian has been nothing but true to her. That should count as something. (It counts as _everything_ , her heart beats.)

“You didn’t say anything,” she tells him and asks for the Force that it be enough. She touches a hand to the side of his face, fingers carefully threading in his hair. He wets his lips and takes a shallow breath, and the fluttering of his lashes fascinate her that she licks her lips too. She wants a lot of things right now. “You don’t have to.”

She kisses him and relishes in the tiny sound he makes at the back of his throat, a groan of surprise. _Please don’t pull away._

He doesn’t. He leans harder into the kiss and opens his mouth, surprise coloring his gasp when their tongues touch. The arm that he has banded around her waist gathers her closer – presses them together so that their legs are tangled.

Jyn feels longing in her chest, afire and screaming for _more_ , the way it always does when Cassian is around. She finally recognizes it – recognizes it as the longing for his fingers on the tiny strip of skin between her shirt and her pants, the longing for the tilt of his head to deepen the kiss, the longing for his longing.

It sounds absurd even in her head, it sounds so reckless – it sounds so good when paired with the stilted moan he makes when she runs her fingernails down his back.

He pulls away but only so that he can breathe, and his lips are parted and red in the dimness of the night, his eyes shiny and dazed. She wonders if she looks the same. She wonders if he’s seeing in her what she’s seeing in him.

He swallows. “Then you know,” he says, a little delirious from the heat. “You must know, Jyn.”

Does she? She told him she didn’t need his words, but now she prays for them to come. She feels like she’s at the edge and she wants to reach out for him – she wants him to pull her to where he is.

Cassian sighs and lifts a slow hand to her jaw, his thumb running the course on her lips where his mouth had been. “You must know,” he continues. “That I’ve been wanting this. I think I’ve been…” he laughs quietly, she loves that laugh so much. “I’ve been feeling more. I’ve been reaching out more, looking at you more.” At that, his eyes meet hers, simple and true like they’ve always been. “I’ve been touching you more. I think about you more. It must show, right?”

It does, Jyn now realizes. And she’s been a fool about it, running around in her mind and making arguments against the actions of the person who’s been the truest to her.

She bites her lip and nods, trying not to smile too hard. He seems pleased because he lays their foreheads together and smiles back, finally. He smiles and her heart slows to a calm, enough that she has time to appreciate what he looks like, kiss drunk and _real_.

When she closes her eyes, she feels his lips on her again and pleads the Force for this to be real for a long time, as she falls asleep.

*

Jyn had prepared for this, she had years and years ago.

That was something she would like to think she had never let go, because if she thinks she had, if she had – if she had let go of that leash, then this would hurt a lot more than it’s supposed to hurt. She had prepared for the moment when _K.I.A._ flashes beside his name on his file.

The transport came back home with only two out of its five operatives, alive but only _barely_. When Jyn found out about the shuttle landing on base, when she found out about the casualties, her first foolish thought was that he survived. If anything, that was what he was keen on doing these days.

And Jyn is such a fool for believing that _wanting_ to survive equates to actually making it.

*

“It could be a stray lothcat.”

Bodhi is very sure that a stray lothcat has ransacked their ship and ate the last pta fruit from the crates and while Jyn is _very sure_ that she’s locked the door that night, Kaytoo greeted them in the morning with the news that the pressurized locks were faulty and that they, the two very vulnerable organics, were very lucky to be alive and not freezing in the vacuum of space.

The fruit is not actually Jyn’s concern, she was more fixated on the shuddering realization that they could have died in space and it would be while they were en route to a supposedly easy gig of meeting with a supplier from an Outer Rim planet and stacking up on tiny trinkets for the astromech droids on base.

So now, apart from meeting with D’kaal for the droid parts, they’re scouring one of Wrea’s bustling street markets for something to protect them from dying in space. It’s more Bodhi’s expertise than Jyn’s so she lets him lead her along the street where the smell of grease is strongest.

“You know,” he says, examining a handful of matte-plated bolts from a merchant’s stack. “He would have made sure the door is airtight before we left the-the base.”

He dons a tiny smile on his handsome face, not meeting her stare. She knows what he’s doing, and he knows that she knows. For a moment there, though, her heart had squeezed painfully, knowing that _he_ would have. That a lot of their lives, all of them in Rogue One, were affected by the sudden loss of the person that essentially brought them together – intentional or not.

(They used to tease him about adopting strays. He would smile and shake his head, never fazed. Always fond. She should have taken note of how he would duck his head chuckle, but she forgot that there is never certainty in forever, however hard she prayed.)

At her silence, he puts the bolts down and grabs her hand, gentle and unsure. He leads her forward, against the sea of organics. She notices the firm grip, unrelenting but kind. Of course, this is Bodhi, he is never unkind.

“We all miss him, you know,” he says. She tries her best to keep up with his pace so that she’s walking beside him and not behind. “It would – it would help if you shared with us your grief. We know you were-you were the closest to Cassian. If you let us help, maybe…” he stops by a stall and smiles politely at the Togrutan behind the display. He plucks a cylinder the size and length of his arm from the stall and frowns at it. “How much for this and-and do you have one in stock that doesn’t have a-a dent?”

The Togrutan nods, holds up a hand, and ducks under the table.

Bodhi turns his gaze to Jyn and tilts his head, his polite smile morphing into sympathy. “Let us be your friends, Jyn. It’s been six months, we just want you to be alright.”

Jyn could say a lot of things right now. She can tell him to kriff off. She can tell him that when she and Cassian were digging through each other’s tragic pasts, they were carving themselves to fit each other and how – how can you uncarve a person’s soul?

But Bodhi’s been kind and patient with her. Chirrut and Baze were also grieving. Kaytoo was logical, but he’s been sulkier than usual. They were all sharing the loss and maybe for the first time in a long while, she’s ready to be alright.

“Okay,” she says and squeezes his hand. She even nods when she says it, despite the prickling of her eyes.

Right now, she’s exhausted to the bones, and acknowledging that is part of healing. She eyes the wide street of this city, wary and tired. If she tells Bodhi that she sometimes sees him in random crowded places like this one, and if she tells him that she eyes crowds now hoping to catch a glimpse of his profile or the back of his head somewhere, that would be a step towards healing.

Except when she _does_ find him in a crowd.

She could be wrong, she can laugh it off and say it’s the travelling and the walking and this cold, cold climate. But the thump in her chest says _no, chase him_ because – because –

Jyn lets go of Bodhi’s hand and starts walking towards the far end of the street where it seems to taper off into another shoreline. At the corner there are benches and food stalls, children and adults alike sitting around enjoying the freezing weather with steaming cups of broth and tea.

Would it make sense in any universe if Jyn sees Cassian’s ghost at a tea stall?

Her feet starts jogging, her hearing blocking out Bodhi’s surprised yelp in favor of letting blood rush in her ears. She’s never seen an apparition this real and she’s still ways away.

If she gets there faster, would the ghost last?

“Cassian,” she calls out in the crowd, her voice dying out in shame and self-consciousness. He’s still there, still buying that stupid cup of tea, and she’s still far enough that he wouldn’t hear her.

Her mind starts listing ways of how he could have survived, something she’s done the minute she allowed herself to. Vaardha Collins said she saw him go down, bullet going from one side of his head to the other – clean through and through. Collins said she saw his eyes go lifeless.

Jyn has a list of things that could have happened had Collins been unthorough with her report. Something unkind grasps Jyn’s heart, something dark and mad. Collins barely survived the assault and there Jyn was, sitting in her bed cursing her for typing out the way Cassian died right in front of her.

 _And yet_ , her mind whispers.

Her hands reach out before she can stop them, grabbing for the arm that has the tea. The man, he sloshes hot tea on his hands and looks down, startled.

When they meet eyes, Jyn’s heart shatters at the cruelty of the universe. Here is someone who looks so much like him, eyes brown and confused. He even gets the lines between his brows that Cassian gets when he’s trying to figure out code.

She is aware of Bodhi running to catch up to her, but she ignores that because this man looks down at her and the grip she has on his arm and she trembles at the familiarity of it all.

When he tilts his head, she catches a glimpse of scarring at his temples and maybe – Jyn hopes against hope that maybe –

And then he says, “Do you… know me?” with the desperation of a man drowning in quicksand.

Her grip relents and a tear escapes her carefully guarded emotions.

“I hope so,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comment and bookmark if yall liked it!


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